The General Election date is November 6th, 2012. The deadline for voter registration for the General Election is October 9, 2012, less than one week from today. Today would be a good day to email five friends with the following information, so they can make sure they’re registered.

Advanced voting in person starts October 15, 2012. More than 10,000 voters are marked as having already voted in the November 6th General Election, according to data from the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.

In our research, we have found that viewers are most likely not to detect dodging when politicians offer answers to similar, but objectively different, questions than the ones they are asked.

In one study, for example, participants were shown video of a politician being asked a question about his policy on either health-care coverage in America, the illegal drug use problem in America, or America’s war on terrorism. He offered the same answer to all three questions: “I’m glad you asked me that. There are so many important problems facing America today. We need universal health care because …” and then proceeded to give a long answer about health care.

People who saw video of the politician who was asked about health care saw him as trustworthy, honest and likable; he answered the question he was asked, after all.

State Rep. elect Lee Hawkins (R-Gainesville) met with a group of constituents Monday night. Jeff Gill of the Gainesville Times gives lengthy coverage of what was a small meeting; this is good reporting, does a service to the voters, and is incredibly rare nowadays.

Candidates on the November 6th ballot are reminded that the grace period for their September 30th Campaign Contribution Disclosure Report runs out October 5th. Get it finished early.

Georgia Commissioner of Juvenile Justice Gale Buckner (not to be confused with 2012 Democrat Senate candidate and former Senator Gail Buckner) will step down from the agency to become the new Chief Magistrate Judge for Murray County. Her predecessor as Chief Magistrate, Bryant Cochran, resigned in the midst of investigations by the FBI, GBI and JQC.

Ayres, the Republican half of the team, noted that the actual electorate in November may not have as many Democrats as this NPR poll’s likely voter sample, which he called “a best-case scenario” for the president’s party.

“When you sample voters over time, you inevitably get varying proportions of Democrats and Republicans in the sample. It’s nothing nefarious, just the vagaries of sampling,” Ayres said. “This sample ended up with seven points more Democrats than Republicans. In 2008, there were seven points more Democrats than Republicans in the electorate, according to exit polls, But in 2004, there were equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans.”

If this year’s voters were to split evenly again between the two major parties, Romney would have an advantage. The NPR poll found him a 4-point favorite among independents.

Most observers expect this year’s party ratio to be somewhere between the Democratic tilt of 2008 and the even split of 2004 (which recurred in the midterm elections of 2010). Stan Greenberg, the Democratic member of the polling team, said polling this year has generally found fewer people self-identifying with the GOP.

“They’re moving into the independent category,” Greenberg said, “where also if you look at the brand position of the Republican Party and Democratic Party, the Republican Party favorability has been dropping throughout this whole period.”

Under oath, Hickman admitted that in the final weeks of Edwards’s 2008 bid, Hickman cherry-picked public polls to make the candidate seem viable, promoted surveys that Hickman considered unreliable, and sent e-mails to campaign aides, Edwards supporters and reporters which argued that the former senator was still in the hunt —even though Hickman had already told Edwards privately that he had no real chance of winning the Democratic nomination.

“They were pounding on me for positive information. You know, where is some good news we can share with people? We were monitoring all these polls and I was sending the ones that were most favorable because [campaign aides] wanted to share them with reporters,” Hickman testified on May 14 at the trial in Greensboro, N.C. “We were not finding very much good news and I was trying to give them what I could find.”

Hickman testified that when circulating the polls, he didn’t much care if they were accurate. “I didn’t necessarily take any of these as for—as you would say, for the truth of the matter. I took them more as something that could be used as propaganda for the campaign,” the veteran pollster said.